The Hunter's public health controller says anyone worried about infecting relatives with COVID on Christmas Day should have a rapid antigen test beforehand.
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Hunter New England Health district recorded 660 cases in the 24 hours to 8pm Sunday, down from 899 on Friday and 712 on Saturday.
HNEH public health controller Dr David Durrheim said his family members had agreed to take Therapeutic Goods Administration-approved rapid antigen tests (RATs) before Christmas.
"If people just want to be safe and are not a known close contact, then rapid antigen testing is something that is an additional safeguard," he said.
"We've all agreed that before we get together we'll have a rapid antigen test."
The at-home RAT kits cost about $10 per test but are selling out quickly at supermarkets and pharmacies.
Dr Durrheim said anyone with symptoms or identified as a close contact must get a PCR test from a testing clinic.
The vast majority of the 4254 cases in the region over the past week are likely to be the omicron variant.
Dr Durrheim said the slight drop in new infections over the weekend "pales in significance compared to the increase from a week ago", when the Hunter recorded just 28 new cases.
It was unclear whether omicron would continue spreading exponentially in the region.
"We've seen an astronomical rise in one week, but it was really due to a number of super-spreader venues."
Reports from South Africa suggest omicron causes milder disease, but a UK report found its severity was similar to that of delta.
"The severity is still an open question. We're getting dissonant data from parts of the world," Dr Durrheim said.
"Many of these places have had some natural infection, so it's quite difficult to extrapolate to an Australian context."
He said booster vaccines appeared to roughly double people's protection against symptomatic infection to the "high seventies".
Two vaccine doses were very likely to offer some protection against severe disease "but we don't know yet".
Three of the region's 4368 active cases are in intensive care, and 17 are in hospital.
Of the 660 cases announced on Monday, 294 were in Newcastle, 220 in Lake Macquarie, 75 in Maitland, 19 in Cessnock and 16 in both Port Stephens and Singleton.